1. SEARCH BY “SHINY” IN THE POKEDEX LIST PAGE

Just as they shared, you can now see all your Shiny Pokemon together by using the search tool on the Pokedex list page! This is handy, especially as Community Days appear to be a new way to deliver shiny species in-game.

2. OVERHAULED ‘NEWS’ SECTION

The new News section appears to have been a large re-work. Now, unread news appears to be prioritized, marked read, and handled more elegantly thereafter.

Give it a spin when news breaks! Perhaps Niantic is planning to make heavier use of this feature to propagate important information about the game and events like Community Day, etc.

3. ENERGY BAR REWORK

Much has changed in regards to the Energy Bar in combat (used for charge moves), including a few puzzling new attributes:

CURRENTBAR

MAXBARS

and a new ‘key’ system that appears to be keeping track of the bars’ progress. Our theory is that this is simply a better way to handle updating the bar progress to potentially avoid getting out-of-sync. But we can’t help but wonder if this update isn’t increasing support for multiple energy bars for … other purposes. 😉

4. DEVICE SUPPORT CHECK

New functions have appeared to check for device support, on the heels of the announcement that iOS devices which can’t support iOS 11 are being deprecated in Pokemon GO.

5. NEW POKEDEX DISPLAY BUTTONS FOR DEOXYS AND CASTFORM

Due to the additional complexity of Deoxys and Castform having ‘forms,’ the Pokedex has been updated to handle toggling between forms, genders, and shinyness.

This bodes well for the launch of these species!

6. NEW WAY OF STORING TRAINER LOCATION

The Trainer’s latitude and longitude are now stored in a new attribute. We’re unsure what this implicates. It may be part of additional anti-cheat measures, or it may simply be intended for future features.

And now for the big finding in this update. Hold on to your Pokemon, travelers:

7. NEW QUEST FUNCTIONALITY!

Previously, the daily spin / daily catch bonus was called a ‘Quest’ in the APK.

With this new update, this entire section has been reworked and a lot has been added. The team has done our best to piece together how this metadata might suggest the mechanics work together in the final product – but this is a hypothesis only at this point!

Nevertheless, here’s how it appears to work, travelers. We see two types of Quests appearing:

STORY_QUEST

CHALLENGE_QUEST

Which appear to simply be dependent on the mechanics required to complete the objective!

Quests have been expanded from 2 objectives to 10

The previous two objectives were:

QUEST_FIRST_CATCH_OF_THE_DAY

QUEST_FIRST_POKESTOP_OF_THE_DAY

We now see new objectives for:

QUEST_CATCH_POKEMON

QUEST_SPIN_POKESTOP

QUEST_HATCH_EGG

QUEST_WALK_BUDDY

QUEST_FEED_POKEMON

QUEST_WIN_GYM_BATTLE

QUEST_COMPLETE_RAID_BATTLE

QUEST_LEVELUP_BADGE

And excitingly, a new

QUEST_MULTI_PART

Which should lend well to combined objectives.

Quest Attributes

We see the following attributes of quests:

Creation Timestamp

Completion Timestamp

Rewards

Status (Active / Completed)

Multipart

Context

Seed

Goal

Quest Characters?

We see new references to Quest characters, firstly Professor Willow!

They also appear to have Character Expressions, though only two so far: UNSET and HAPPY.

Perhaps you must complete the quest to make the NPC happy!

Quest Pre-Conditions

It appears that some quests may be gated behind pre-conditions. The following appear:

QUEST_PRECONDITION_UNSET

QUEST_PRECONDITION_QUEST

QUEST_PRECONDITION_LEVEL

QUEST_PRECONDITION_MEDAL

So we may be required to earn a medal, achieve a certain Trainer Level, or even have completed a different quest before embarking on a new one.

Can you believe it, travelers!?

We’re looking at the beginnings of an in-game quest system that appears to encapsulate all of the mechanics available in Pokemon GO, even incorporates characters who grant them, and pre-conditions that suggest increasing levels of difficulty and progress.

We’re beyond excited to see these mechanics add depth to gameplay for all our travelers – but especially the higher-level folks who’ve largely accomplished many of their goals on the Road so far.

Remember, these mechanics are not live in v0.91.1 that we can see. It is currently unknown how long this feature may take to launch. But the fact that it’s here is a very good sign that we can expect to see this feature sooner than later!